Tag Archives: caption

Snow Delay

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Unicorn in Captivity

Oh look it's a Medieval painting of unicorn. That completely makes sense for this article-- or not.

This week’s episode of digitalflood Pirate Radio (“Volume 6 Episode 6″ ) was held up by a number of things including two blizzards and trying to catch up on my day job after a long weekend. The result is I’m pushing the episode back until probably next week for release. I’ll post when it looks like we’re going to get back on target. MC Mary @ The Disco! also couldn’t show up because of the snow to further complicate things and that too is delaying her inevitable return.

I’ve been working on another web site for a client of ours at work that is coming along rather well. As soon as we get out of the Alpha testing and into Beta I’ll give you a glimpse at that. The client still has to sign off on the work and until I have their okay I have to keep it under wraps, but I’m fairly impressed at even the early work. All that production work will certainly aid me as I begun rethinking df.com itself over the course of Summer Hiatus. Development went so well, in fact, that I’m thinking of pushing up Version 12 of this site to late Spring 2010. Again, I’ll post when we get closer; but my feeling is that with minimal work I can migrate the site over to what I believe is the new layout framework within a matter of two or three days.

I’m also working on a new feature weekly article now that I’m done with my shoulder surgery recovery. The new article series will be a bit lighter in nature, but I think many of you will enjoy it never the less.

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Arming Up

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Akai MPD18 Pad Controller

Akai MPD18 Pad Controller

Last week DJ A.D.D. was kind enough to let me borrow his Akai MPD18 for an extended trial as he has recently gotten a much snazzier model. For my purposes though, the MPD18 fits in perfect with my DJ rig. It integrates into Virtual DJ and is great for initiating sampler/sound clips. As a bonus I can also use it to drive VST instruments (or virtual instruments). Even better, I managed to get a MIDI to USB cable. This lets me hook up my old Boss DR202 and also trigger MIDI effect in VirtualDJ. All in all, I have more buttons than I should ever need and a quickly growing DJ rig. I ran through a practice mix session and while there is going to be some additional learning time needed, I was able to integrate all of the equipment into my mixing style with ease. I spent a good deal of time working up a new MIDI map. I also finally mapped in a crossfader EQ mixer setup that will work nicely when mixing track to track. Again, I tried it out for the first time last night and the test run went excellent. You should hear some of these new tricks by this week’s Pirate Radio (still on for 2/16/10).

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Pirate Radio? Oh yeah, we do that!

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The Cyclades Mill in Greece

Oh look... it's the Cyclades Mill in Greece, which I'm sure will come in handy to know about. Or not.

The biggest question on your mind has to be “When is digitalflood Pirate Radio Volume 6 Episode 5 going to be out?” I know it is. And even if it isn’t– I’m in denial and ergo it is. So there. The answer is probably tomorrow night. The live session is all recorded. It’s just got to be put through post-production and I have to be honest with you– there isn’t much needed. I’m either getting better at live mixing or getting less daring about doing stupid things while mixing. Maybe a bit of both. Either way, this one came together pretty fast. Without giving away too much about the show I’m pretty sure you’ll dig it (or at least 99% of you will… which is close enough for me).

Other than that I’ve just been so plain busy at work (a.k.a. my real job) there really hasn’t been much else going on. So it’s not that df.com isn’t happening– it’s just happening slower because I have some other pending priorities, which are as follows:

  1. Being able to pay bills.
  2. Being able to afford food.
  3. Being able to pay rent.
  4. Being able to not die because the aforementioned needs are being met.

Fortunately I have been able to sneak family time in there so the wife and kids aren’t being neglected. No offense, but if it comes down to posting a blog or spending time with my daughters and wife– well the post isn’t happening. I’m sure you understand and I sure as Hell hope instead of checking out df.com you’d rather spend time with your family… or not… *ahem*… awkward!

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Shoulder Surgery – 13 weeks in

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Don't be fooled... healthcare is far from a non-profit industry!

Don't be fooled... healthcare is far from a non-profit industry!

Last post I talked about how my recovery from Open Bankart Surgery on my right shoulder had begun to focus on pure strength training and continued development of my outward flexibility. This routine was exactly the same for week thirteen except that my physical therapist (PT) increased my weight by one pound on each exercise. This made it overall much harder to do, but I got through it. I also cut back to two visits for the week. The pure intensity of the work outs require at least a day to recover and I find with the long weekend in between the sessions I recover more fully so as not impede forward progress. When I went to return for my second two visits to head into week fourteen I was told that my insurance company said my progress was adequate for the treatment and that I no longer needed PT. As such, they would pay for no more PT sessions.

With that I’m waiting to talk with my orthopedic surgery (hopefully tomorrow) to discuss this further. I’m not so sure this is the case. While I have regained about 75% of my capabilities I’m nowhere near being able to perform high impact sports or able to lift over thirty pounds. I also managed to get to an external rotation of 72 degrees. This is still short of 90% of the full 90 degrees that we wanted and thus there is no way I don’t need further treatment.

We’ll see how the appeal process goes, but with cost consolidation being the way of modern corporate America courtesy of the never ending recession none of this surprises me. Of course, it is disheartening to see one’s health care now comes under such scrutiny where close enough is considered fully recovered– not good news. Glad I didn’t get open heart surgery… I can only imagine how that would have been. It’s beating so that’s close enough for us!

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Making Sense of Things

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Emperor Penguin

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be lots of random pics of Emperor Penguins on the Net. We can change that one blog post at time! (© Samuel Blanc - http://www.sblanc.com)

I spent some time over the last twenty four hours building out better menu sorting for the digitalflood Pirate Radio episodes that I think you’ll find quite the time saver. If you hover over the “Music” menu at the top of this page and then hover over “DF Pirate Radio Webcasts” you’ll see a new sub-menu shoot out that breaks down all of the episodes season by season. I know this is long overdue, but better late than never (as they say).

I’m still mulling over what I want to do for “digitalflood Pirate Radio Vol. 6 Episode 4”. I don’t have any guests setup for the show and MC Mary @ The Disco! is back on college hiatus (as she continues pursuing her degree in nursing) so it looks like another solo session. If any one is interested in being on let me know. You probably won’t be able to make this episode, but at least I can maybe get another show going at a later date with actual people on it. In the meantime, I’ve been dying to trying out some new tricks I learned online from some tutorial videos. I picked up a new technique for using the cross channel frequency mixer to blend songs together and maybe that’s what I’ll record either Sunday or Monday night. Release date is still to be decided, but I’m aiming for either this Tuesday (1/26/10) or Wednesday (1/27/10). More on that as things begin to gel and actual recording takes place.

I have to tell you, my search page referrer hits for shoulder surgery have taken off as of late. I’m getting tons of visitors coming across this site just from my weekly recovery logs and it has been a pleasant surprise. I apparently rank pretty high across the various search engines (Yahoo, Google, etc…) when it comes to shoulder surgery searches. My hope was when I began all of this recovery logging that it would both allow me to track my recovery, as well as, help others as they go through the struggle of recovering themselves. Judging from the hits and feedback that seems to be the case. So now we can say digitalflood.com is more than pure fluff– there’s some science and biology in there as well. Who would have thought that?

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